flickr game: name that movie, and social OPACs
In Flickr I recently titled and tagged a photo of mine with the name of a movie. I clicked through to see what other photos were tagged with “videodrome” and found one that is part of a flickr group called NAME THAT FILM. Group members post screenshots of films (placing them in the group and tagging them with name that film. Other members attempt to figure out what film it’s from. Try it out!
This is fun stuff, but it is also slightly important. Flickr didn’t intend for people to play this game but it sprung up organically nevertheless. People are creative and will do neat things when they can interact with data on the web. Imagine if we could build something like this into our OPACs. Off the top of my head, what about having short passages listed (or letting people contribute them), the make the goal figuring out the book to which it belongs and posting a URL to the book’s OPAC record. Oh my! A game that would make people better at finding stuff in our collections.
I’m sure if our OPACs were social, people would come up with all sorts of games and most certainly interesting tags. Here are some tags I’d love to see:
- stories to read on a stormy night
- books i’m reading in high school
- relaxing
- you’ll hate this book
- read by:username
- not written by a dead white male
- favorited by:username
- chicago
- High School Name: English 205
- reluctant readers (clearly tagged by a librarian!)
- CDs that changed my life
- for:username
A guy can dream, can’t he?
18 Nov 06 :: 4:31:00 pm
An OPAC with social tagging–well, an OPAC that can be hacked and played with in general–is a dream of mine as well. Maybe someday…
18 Nov 06 :: 9:24:26 pm
[…] Aaron Schmidt of walking paper dreams about the possibilities if library OPACs (Online Public Access Catalogues) moving into the social networking realm. He cites the example of a Flickr group called NAME THAT FILM, where members post screenshots of movies and other members would try to guess what film it comes from by tagging that photo. He feels that if OPACs become social, then it would interesting to see what sort of games our readers might come up with similar to the Flickr one. I’m curious as to what readers would tag the books that they have read if tagging is possible. Currently, there are already some libraries that have OPACs that have a social networking element. And I’m sure there’ll be many more in the next couple of years when libraries become more Library 2.0. […]
20 Nov 06 :: 11:42:03 pm
Aaron - great ideas. There’s a lot of capacity and enthusiasm for play that can actually contribute interesting, fun and useful content for library/catalogue web sites. Luis Von Ahn has developed the ESP and other games and explores the untapped potential of games in his work on Human Computation.
Other titles:
Characters I’d like to be when I grow up
Books that changed the way I think
Books I wish my ___ would read
Most annoying book ever
21 Nov 06 :: 9:08:54 am
Ahhh, I’ve played ESP before. Now I know who made it. Great tags too!
31 Jul 07 :: 11:43:55 pm
is it social to walk with books